Daily Search Forum Recap: June 4, 2009

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Are Blogs Doomed With NoFollow PageRank Sculpting Issue?
Yesterday we covered the news that SEOs are wasting PageRank by using the nofollow to sculpt their PageRank. In short, if you had 10 links on a page, and nofollowed 5 of them, the 5 that are followed only get half credit. So what is the issue with blogs, forum and other user generated content sites? As mentioned in the WebmasterWorld, blogs and other sites that automatically add the nofollow attribute to user generated links,

Most of Bing's Tools Are From Live Search
So, Microsoft made some serious press with Bing, their new search engine, going live. The search interface is very different from Live.com and some of the vertical search portals, like video, maps, images have new features, but a lot of the tools remain the same. For example, people are first noticing that Bing has a Local Business Center. Honestly, the way to get there is to go to https://ssl.search.live.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx and it will redirect you to

Mixing NoIndex & Rel=Canonical Tag In One Page
An interesting Google Webmaster Help thread discusses the old and new way of handling duplicate content. In the old days, you either 301 redirected page A to page B, when there was duplicate content. But if that wasn't possible, you instructed the search engine not to index the duplicate page, by adding a noindex tag to the duplicate page. Some people had this automated through their CMS. With the addition of the new rel=canonical link

Live Blog Coverage of SMX Advanced 2009
This is one of the first major Search Marketing Expo conferences we have not live blogged ever. The reason was because I recently had a kid and it would be hard to leave at this time. But that doesn't mean there wasn't any live blogging going on. Several bloggers covered the sessions in live format. I even posted summaries of the coverage I found at Search Engine Land for SMX Advanced Day One and SMX

Detailed Look At Google's New Local Business Center Analytics
The other day, Google announced improvements with analytics for the Google Local Business Center. I thought I take you through detailed screen shots of how my business listing appears in the LBC. (1) Analytic Graphs plotting both "impressions" (views) and "actions": Impressions are the views of your local listing in Google. Any time someone sees your listing in Google. The actions include clicks on "more info," clicking on "driving directions" or clicking on your web